I have posted my commencement speech that I won't be giving at my graduation ceremony coming up. There were a number of other contestants for the honor and I wasn't the one selected. Lest the effort go completely to waste, I've made the speech available here.

Hope is nice. It's good. I have hope, and I hope that other people have hope too. I think it is a necessary part of achievement and an important extension to dreaming.

The sparkles were causing memory problems that I didn't want to bother fixing, so I moved on to the next version: move the balloons. I photoshopped them out of the background, replaced them with blue sky, then dropped them in the flash file and told them to move back and forth across the screen.

Notice that the closer balloons move faster than the ones which are farther away.

Nifty? I think so. Maybe the Cedar City SkyFest is in need of a new website?

OK, if you think that I should be able to find a better use of time than figuring out how to make moving flash page backgrounds, I'd have to say -- you'd be absolutely WRONG! Isn't it cool? Sure, it's a Nerd's implementation of a concept, and not a designer nerd at that, but I think it's very cool anyway to have little sparkles going on between the hot air balloons and my page content.

For anyone who cares, here's what's going on, from the top layer down.

1) Page content. Text and what not.
2) 60% opaque png background on Drupal Zen's Page element

So lately I've had the displeasure of having a few big, juicy, orange carrots (or Twinkies if, take your pick) dangling in front of my face. When they appeared, I was excited to see them, and eager to taste them. Turns out, though, that there's a couple of nasty little gremlins standing on my head with these carrots tied to sticks, and they're pretty intent on keeping the tempting treats just out of my reach. One of these carrots happens to be my new house. We saw we could get a stellar deal on foreclosed house with a killer interest rate, so we decided to jump in and buy.

"The year is dying, in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die."
--Alfred Tennyson

As years are prone to do, 2008 has gone into the night for the last time. When the sun arose this morning over the frigid, snow crusted landscape of the valley, it rose on a new year.